How People Actually React Over Losses in Bargaining: Experimental Evidences from Work Distribution in Ultimatum and Dictator Game

Abstract

The current study aims to report the first Ultimatum and Dictator bargaining game over the real works Our experiment was created to avoid the impact of windfall gains In contrast with monetary time and real effort cannot be granted by the experimenter and imply a natural loss to all people We expect that the intensive efforts and time required to complete the real works will evoke the selfishness from proposer reflected by imposing more works to the receivers Compare with Ultimatum Game over gain where fair splits are mostly observed we want to observe if fair splits are also mostly observed in Ultimatum Game over loss using works as our experimental currency for losses We suggest that there are five factors that might impact on subject’s splitting behavior in the Ultimatum Game and Dictatorship Bargaining Game over the loss These are Risk Averse Altruism Fairness Norm Personal Time Value and Loss Averse A comparison with previous studies about bargaining over gain subjects in our experimental setting is quite altruistic toward receivers when distributing loss Even in the most favorable conditions such Dictator Game the proposer’s behaviors are not biased toward being totally selfish with the average offer around 62% of the total works Our research results found that risk-averse play an important role in explaining proposer’s allocating behavior in the Ultimatum Game The higher personal time values the more works proposers would like to impose on receivers Loss-averse and people justice toward fairness also found to have an influence on proposer’s offer but not statistically significant Besides that our findings also support the previous studies that self-reported altruism scale may not reliably predict altruistic behavior

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English
Supervisor	Wei-Shiun Chang (Supervisor)